Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019?

#81

Post by tom-jh » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 7:28 PM UTC

alexbanks wrote: post #66

I've spent this year mostly on Go. I think I'm in a maybe good enough spot to be employable with it? Which was probably my goal all along. Through Go, though, I've been feeling like picking up a language with a more advanced type system. Usually when I have that feeling I get trapped in analysis paralysis and just never pick anything up. I've been considering just hard-committing to Java/the JVM and taking it as it i…

Take a look at Kotlin. We are building our enterprise products with it. You get all the benefits of Java (stability, maturity) without the bad parts (boilerplate, boredom).

We just hired a Kotlin person (really a Java guy who refreshed his Kotlin over the weekend) for this, and we may be hiring more.

I suspect more companies will start looking at Kotlin in the next 2-3 years, especially for green field projects.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019?

#82

Post by ScottFree » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 7:28 PM UTC

Business and marketing. I'm basically running my own business anyway. It's about time I got better at it.

OS's. I'd like to build my own, but I've been a web developer for 15 years. It's going to be an uphill battle. I'm halfway through Learn C the Hard Way.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019?

#83

Post by rpastuszak » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 7:29 PM UTC

Product design using Human-Centered Design principles and public speaking, obviously learning by practice—I’ve spent too much time staring at the keyboard in the past two years and this feels both somewhat intimidating and fun.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019?

#84

Post by spraak » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 7:29 PM UTC

k0t0n0 wrote: post #5

microservices,kafka and Clojure/FP. I just went over the microservices part and it's already boring. but Clojure as a language interests me but I never really developed on JVM. so I am skeptic about that. JVM out of the way I think clojure could be a good replacement for node/php/golang for server-side.

So I've been looking into microservices communicating with a persistent message broker like Kafka and what I'm still not sure about is the frotnend - that is, I know that the FE will communicate over https with an API gateway service (so REST or GraphQL) but if the FE needs a resource, how should the API gateway handle the request back to the browser? The only pattern I've seen so far is to issue a 201 CREATED for e.g. creating a user. Have you come across any other patterns for this?

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019?

#85

Post by james_s_tayler » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

spraak wrote: post #79

notamy wrote: post #69

In tech: Diving deeper into Elixir and Rust. Outside of tech: Korean! I find it absolutely fascinating to learn.

I recall that the origin of Korean is somewhat mysterious, have you come across that?

Linguistically it's grammatically about 80% the same as Japanese and if you replace Hangul with Hanja where possible you'll see a tonne of it's vocabulary is from Chinese.

I guess what's mysterious is which of Korean / Japanese influenced which??

Korean has a slightly more complex grammar than Japanese. Not by much but there are some forms in Korean that don't exist in Japanese. But it's remarkable how they are almost identical.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019?

#86

Post by trykondev » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

I'm kind of cheating with this answer because it's not a specific piece of tech, but the thing that I'm really focused on learning right now is how to build out my business by hiring developers & learning how to properly manage them as they help contribute to some of my company's projects.

Most of my development work has been solo, with occasional one-off help from contractors. But the number and scope of my projects has been growing and I've been struggling to keep up, so I'm now going through my first round of finding people to hire, designing a fair & useful interview process, and figuring out the best way to break down my current projects so that it's minimally painful for a new developer to ramp up on them.

This process has also forced me to actually start looking for a legitimate source of funding for my business, besides my own savings. I've been trying to learn this side of things, but it's been a real struggle -- I've definitely been living in the bubble of focusing on my product without thinking about the business side of things for too long, and I'm finally making the leap in terms of taking the business side of things seriously.

Any words of encouragement or advice are greatly appreciated :)

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019?

#87

Post by spraak » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 7:39 PM UTC

kissgyorgy wrote: post #56

Kubernetes, Kafka, Microservices

Hey, I've been learning Kafka too and posted this on another sibling comment:

> So I've been looking into microservices communicating with a persistent message broker like Kafka and what I'm still not sure about is the frotnend - that is, I know that the FE will communicate over https with an API gateway service (so REST or GraphQL) but if the FE needs a resource, how should the API gateway handle the request back to the browser? The only pattern I've seen so far is to issue a 201 CREATED for e.g. creating a user. Have you come across any other patterns for this?

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019?

#88

Post by tracer4201 » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 7:40 PM UTC

brunosan wrote: post #48

I'm surprised there was no mention (yet!) to fast.ai here. I've decided to learn deep learning this year, after many failed tries with other approaches. Their framework (built over PyTorch), their course, and their community around it are simply the best I've found so far. Very much recommend to anyone who knows a bit of coding and wants to learn Deep Learning quickly and pragmatically.

Can you describe a bit more on why you’ve found this more helpful? Any cool hobby projects you’ve been able to build from this or other applications?

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019?

#89

Post by spraak » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 7:40 PM UTC

nvarsj wrote: post #73

duncan-donuts wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent about 9 months 2 years ago learning Swedish. It was really fun and I enjoyed watching Swedish tv shows. I think learning languages just because is pretty rad

How did you learn? Immersion?

My daughter speaks super well from watching Swedish shows with the app Barnkanalen SVT - just use a VPN with an address in Sweden to access it.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning in 2019?

#90

Post by DoreenMichele » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC

After a decade of wanting to learn to code while life got in the way, I'm actually doing more coding (mostly CSS styling for websites I run) and laying the groundwork for eventually learning a real programming language.

In the spring, a developer from HN talked to me and recommended a free course and I also applied to an online coding school offering free tuition for the summer. In the process of applying, I learned my computer doesn't really have enough RAM.

I haven't been able to spare the $40 or so it would take to upgrade it. I've been working more and moved to a larger apartment to improve my working conditions. (I'm still in an SRO, but now I have a private bath and a George Foreman grill.) I hope to eventually get a laptop to further improve my productivity.

Between my medical condition and extreme poverty, getting anything done takes forever. But I'm actually cautiously optimistic and excited to be working towards goals instead of spending all my time putting out the endless fires of my shitastic life.

I also set up a blog to help me gather learning resources in one place so I can find them again when I can get all my ducks in a row and have the physical arrangements and ability to set time aside to actually learn to program.